LoL at “anti-racists” who move to all white neighborhoods “for the schools”

“Blacks are great!” they proclaim. “I just don’t want my kids to ever interact with one.”

Today we’re talking about school myths:

1. The schools are failing.

“The schools are failing” is a political talking point, a scare tactic designed to drum up votes. It bears little relation to reality.

If you are reading this, then chances are someone taught you to read, and that person was probably a public school teacher.

People come from all over the world to study at American universities; few Americans scatter abroad to study at other countries’ universities.

Our economy has, for the past century or so, been among the most advanced in the world. We’ve created or contributed significantly to the development of cars, airplanes, atomic bombs, computers, vaccines, etc. Oh, and we PUT A MAN ON THE MOON.

And everyone who worked on space program (immigrants excluded) started attending US schools back around 1910-1940. (I suspect our schools have gotten better since then.)

People make a big deal out of US students not scoring #1 in the world in international-comparison tests. What of it? There are lots of countries with smart people in them, and we can’t all be first.

But even granting this, the reports of American under-performance are massively overstated. Let’s compare the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading scores for the US and 64 other countries (graph thanks to Steve Sailer, who spent two days combing through PISA data to make it):

Counting only countries that are actually countries (ie not Shanghai,) the US comes in #14. We scored better than 24 European countries, and significantly better than all of the Muslim, Latin American, and “other” countries in the data set.

“Above average among first world countries,” is a perfectly respectable place for a first world school system.

But you may have noticed the red bars in our graph. Yes, the US data is broken down by race, because the US is a significantly more diverse country than, say, Finland. Or Japan.

Asian Americans outscore Asians in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. (and Taipei and Macao.) The only people on earth who are scoring better than our Asians are Shanghai’s Asians.

European Americans outscore Japan and every European country but Finland.

Latino Americans outscore every single Latino country in the dataset.

No African countries are represented in the dataset (though I hear Trinidad is half black,) probably due to the severe poverty of African countries. Nevertheless, just as African Americans outscore Trinidadians, I am confident that they would also outscore continental Africans were they concluded–there’s a pretty clear correlation here between development level and PISA scores.

In other words, whenever someone says, “American schools are failing,” what they really mean is “American blacks and Hispanics score worse than Europeans.”

Can we do better for our blacks and Hispanics? Perhaps, but any set of reforms that start out based on the notion that “the schools are failing” is highly unlikely to solve the problem of “blacks score worse than whites.”

2. We don’t spend enough on education.

(With thanks to reason.com for the charts.)
3. But we’d do even better if we spent more.

4. Inner-city schools are underfunded.

From the National Center for Education Statistics report, Disparities in Public School District Spending, way back in the dark days of 1995.

“Actual” in this graph means what it sounds like: the actual amount of money districts spent per student.

“Multivariate Cost- and Need-Adjusted” controls for factors like the number of ESL and special ed. students in a district, (who are counted as multiple students because they cost more to educate;) local cost-of-educating differences, (eg, land for building a school on is more expensive in urban districts than rural ones;) and SES, (so that poor blacks are compared to equally poor whites.)

The authors summarize their findings:

More money is spent in districts with the highest percentages of minority students compared to districts with the lowest percentages of minority students ($4,514 versus $3,920). Although minority students in poverty are often viewed as those least served by current systems of public education funding, these findings suggest that while inequalities may remain for students in poverty, they do not appear to be driven by minority status. …

The distribution of public education resources is substantially more nearly equal than wealth measured by housing values, and somewhat less varied than wealth measured by household income.

State public education allocation systems are the primary equalizing factors of education resources, with some additional equalization resulting from the various federal funding programs. …

When socioeconomic status is measured by cost-adjusted median household income, however, and all other factors are held constant, the expenditures per student between the highest and lowest income groups differ by only $186 ($4,382 versus $4,196). …

Controlling for other school district characteristics, only school districts in the category with the fewest children in poverty spend substantially more per student.

But this is all very abstract. Let’s get a little more specific, with the Kansas City, Missouri (yes there is a “Kansas City” in Missouri,) inner-city school district:

To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

The project ran from roughly 1985 through 1997. The article gives more details on everything they tried:

Once Clark decided for the plaintiffs, he didn’t ask them to do things on the cheap. When it came time to fill in the plan’s specifics, he invited them to “dream”⁽¹⁵⁾–to use their imaginations, push the envelope, try anything that would both achieve integration and raise student scores. The idea was that Kansas City would be a demonstration project in which the best and most modern educational thinking would for once be combined with the judicial will and the financial resources to do the job right. No longer would children go to schools with broken toilets, leaky roofs, tattered books, and inadequate curricula. The schools would use the most modern teaching techniques; have the best facilities and the most motivated teachers; and, on top of everything else, be thoroughly integrated, too. Kansas City would show what could be done if a school district had both the money and the will. …

By the time he recused himself from the case in March 1997, Clark had approved dozens of increases, bringing the total cost of the plan to over $2 billion–$1.5 billion from the state and $600 million from the school district (largely from increased property taxes).

With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge’s chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability.

To entice white students to come to Kansas City, the district had set aside $900,000 for advertising, including TV ads, brochures, and videocassettes. If a suburban student needed a ride, Kansas City had a special $6.4 million transportation budget for busing. If the student didn’t live on a bus route, the district would send a taxi. Once the students got to Kansas City, they could take courses in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin. The computer magnet at Central High had 900 interconnected computers, one for every student in the school. In the performing arts school, students studied ballet, drama, and theater production. …

For students in the classical Greek athletic program, there were weight rooms, racquetball courts, and a six-lane indoor running track better than those found in many colleges. The high school fencing team, coached by the former Soviet Olympic fencing coach, took field trips to Senegal and Mexico.⁽¹⁸⁾

The ratio of students to instructional staff was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.⁽¹⁹⁾ There was $25,000 worth of beads, blocks, cubes, weights, balls, flags, and other manipulatives in every Montessori-style elementary school classroom. Younger children took midday naps listening to everything from chamber music to “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” For working parents the district provided all-day kindergarten for youngsters and before- and after-school programs for older students.

Now you know why my parents thought it was a great idea to send me to a ghetto school. One year was more than enough.

It was more than the district could handle. District expenditures took quantum leaps from $125 million in fiscal year 1985 to $233 million in FY88 to $432 million in FY92.⁽²¹⁾ There were too much largesse, too many resources, and too little security. A woman in the Finance Department went to jail for writing checks to her own account. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and supplies were lost to “rampant theft” every year.⁽²²⁾ …

Perhaps the worst problem for what one school board president called the district’s “modestly qualified” administrators was the sheer volume of paperwork.⁽²⁴⁾ When the judge started building schools and inviting school principals to order whatever they wanted, purchase orders flooded into the central administrative office at the rate of 12,000 a month. Clerks were overwhelmed, devastated, and too ashamed to admit they couldn’t handle the crush. The system just collapsed.⁽²⁵⁾

In other words, ghetto districts with falling-apart schools get that way because they have incompetent ghetto administrators who take the money for themselves instead of investing it in school maintenance. Giving them more money does not suddenly make them realize that stealing from little kids is immoral; it just means they steal more money.

And the honest ones among them were too dumb to run a school district to start with.

To outsiders, it appeared that the KCMSD had gone on a spending binge. At $400 million, Kansas City’s school budget was two to three times the size of those of similar districts elsewhere in the country. The Springfield, Missouri, school district, for instance, had 25,000 students, making it two-thirds as big as the KCMSD. Yet Springfield’s budget ($101 million) was only one-quarter to one-third the size of Kansas City’s ($432 million at its peak).⁽²⁷⁾

Everything cost more in Kansas City.⁽²⁸⁾ Whereas nearby districts were routinely building 500-student elementary schools for around $3 million, in Kansas City comparably sized schools cost $5 million to $6 million. Whereas the nearby Blue Valley district built a 1,600-student high school at a cost of $20.5 million, including furniture and equipment, in Kansas City the 1,200-student Central High cost $33 million (it came with a field house larger than those of many colleges, ubiquitous computers, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool).^{(29) …}

With some 600 employees for a district of 36,000 students, the KCMSD had a central administration that was three to five times larger than the administrations of other comparably sized public school districts. It was also 150 times larger than the administration of the city’s Catholic school system, in which four people–one superintendent, two assistant superintendents, and a part-time marketing manager–ran a school district of 14,000 students.⁽³²⁾ The KCMSD was so top-heavy that a 1991 audit discovered that 54 percent of the district’s budget never made it to the classroom; rather, it was used for food service, transportation, and, most of all, central administration.⁽³³⁾

…44 percent of the entire state budget for elementary and secondary education was going to just the 9 percent of the state’s students who lived in Kansas City and St. Louis.⁽³⁴⁾

So how did the schools do? Did test scores go up?

But despite a $900,000 television advertising budget and a $6.4 million special budget for door-to-door transportation of suburban students, the district did not attract the 5,000 to 10,000 white suburban students the designers of the desegregation plan had envisioned. The largest number it ever enrolled was 1,500, and most white students returned to their old suburban schools or to local private schools after one year … By the 1996-97 school year, only 387 suburban students were still attending school in the KCMSD.⁽⁷¹⁾ … the cost of attracting those suburban students was half a million dollars per year per child.

Genuine question: Why even bother trying to attract white students? Why not just focus on making a great, outstanding school for the black kids? There is nothing special about sitting next to a white kid in class that makes black kids suddenly get better test scores. We don’t exude magic education rays. The best you can hope for is either 1. The districts’ test scores go up because they now have more high-scoring white students, which seems rather beside the point if your goal is to help black kids get better test scores, or 2. The white students help the black kids with their schoolwork, in which case the district is exploiting children as unpaid teachers.

And having been one of those kids exploited as unpaid teachers, my opinion of that is best expressed in all caps cursing. Children are not teachers; making one kid teach their peers results in their peers hating them and increased bullying and violence toward the kid.

Don’t make little kids do your job for you just because you can’t.

Continuing on:

Year after year the test scores would come out, the achievement levels would be no higher than before, and the black-white gap (one-half a standard deviation on a standard bell curve) would be no smaller.⁽⁸¹⁾ Although the initial gap was small, by the 12th grade, blacks’ scores on standardized tests were about three years behind those of whites (10.1 vs. 13.1).⁽⁸²⁾ At Central High School, which tended to attract suburban white computer hackers, white males were five years ahead of black males on standardized tests.^{(83) …} 

The average black student’s reading skills increased by only 1.1 grade equivalents in four years of high school.⁽⁸⁹⁾ At Central High, complained Clark, black males were actually scoring no higher on standardized tests when they graduated as seniors than they had when they enrolled as freshmen four years before.⁽⁹⁰⁾ …

In perhaps the biggest surprise, Armor’s studies found that black elementary students who go to magnet schools (which have the highest percentages of whites) score no better on standardized tests than do blacks who go to all-black nonmagnet schools.⁽⁹⁷⁾ In short, Armor found that, contrary to the notion on which the whole desegregation plan was founded–that going to school with middle-class whites would increase blacks’ achievement–the Kansas City experiment showed that “integration has no effect.”^{(98) …}

Finally, the district had discovered that it was easier to meet the court’s 60/40 integration ratio by letting black students drop out than by convincing white students to move in. As a result, nothing was done in the early days of the desegregation plan about the district’s appalling high school dropout rate, which averaged about 56 percent in the early 1990s (when desegregation pressures were most intense) and went as high as 71 percent at some schools (for black males it was higher still).^(109)…

Although Kansas City did increase teacher pay a total of 40 percent to an average of about $37,000 (maximum was $49,008 per year for Ph.D.s with 20 years experience), test scores for the district were consistently below state and national averages.⁽¹²¹⁾ Parochial school teachers, in contrast, earned an average of $24,423, but their students’ test scores were consistently above state and national averages.⁽¹²²⁾

In fact, the supposedly straightforward correspondence between student achievement and money spent, which educators had been insisting on for decades, didn’t seem to exist in the KCMSD. At the peak of spending in 1991-92, Kansas City was shelling out over $11,700 per student per year.⁽¹²³⁾ For the 1996-97 school year, the district’s cost per student was $9,407, an amount larger, on a cost-of-living-adjusted basis, than any of the country’s 280 largest school districts spent.⁽¹²⁴⁾ Missouri’s average cost per pupil, in contrast, was about $5,132 (excluding transportation and construction), and the per pupil cost in the Kansas City parochial system was a mere $2,884.⁽¹²⁵⁾

Oh, does anyone remember that time Zuckerberg gave the Newark School District 100 million dollars in 2010, and it completely disappeared and did absolutely nothing?

As for the district schools forced — or incentivized — to compete with charters, those involved with the Newark effort point to green shoots of change. Graduation rates are up. More higher- rated teachers are staying than lower- performing ones. Still, on state tests of third- to eighth-graders, math and reading proficiency went down in all six grades between 2011 and 2014.

5. The teachers are incompetent.

This seems to be the conservatives’ favorite response to cases like Newark and Kansas City. Oh, if only we could just fire all of the teachers and replace them with different teachers, then test scores would go up! And we need some kind of standardized, “Common Core” taught in all of the schools so that incompetent teachers can’t get away with not teaching their students!

I find this attitude really hostile to teachers, the vast majority of whom are genuinely hard working and dedicated folks. I’ve attended plenty of schools, had a wide variety of teachers, and all of them did a perfectly good job of teaching. (I did have a couple I didn’t like personally, but I still learned from them.) Student performance has a lot more to do with the students than with the teachers:

In summary: teacher quality probably explains 10% of the variation in same-year test scores. A +1 SD better teacher might cause a +0.1 SD year-on-year improvement in test scores. This decays quickly with time and is probably disappears entirely after four or five years, though there may also be small lingering effects.

If teacher quality explains 10% of the variation, then student quality (and random chance) explain 90% of the variation.

Some kids, when you hand them a standardized test, take one look at it and say, “NOPE.” Young boys, in particular, do not seem well suited to sitting still for long hours every day doing worksheets, reading books, or taking tests. Young girls, by contrast, are much better at simply being still and concentrating.

This is not the teachers’ fault.

Some kids get substantially more help at home than other kids. Homework help, tutoring help, breakfast, lead levels in their environment, etc. Regardless of what these things do to long-term outcomes, they certainly make a short-term difference on standardized tests in fourth grade.

This is not the teachers’ fault.

And some kids are just plain smarter or harder working than other kids.

This is also not the teachers’ fault.

I’m sure there are bad teachers; there may be significant impediments to firing them. But they are not some sort of massive, nation-wide problem that requires us to pour millions of dollars into dictating the curriculum, (which, ironically, prevents them from teaching “above grade level” material to students who would benefit from it,) and scrutinizing their every move like some sort of educational panopticon.

Remember, teachers back in 1910-1930 managed to educate their students well enough that they sent a man to the moon.

What about these findings of long-term financial gains from having a superior kindergarten teacher, or having three great teachers in a row vs. having three terrible teachers in a row?

I’m going with data is confounded all to hell.

Well-off parents buy outrageously expensive houses in all-white districts in order to send their kids to schools with other whites (and Asians.) “For the test scores,” of course. Since teacher quality is determined by test scores, which is in turn determined by the intelligence of the other kids in the class (or at least how much they’ve crammed for the test,) all this is telling us is that slightly dumb rich kids do well financially later in life because they come from well-off families.

The only kids who are enduring three of the worst teachers in a row are the absolute poorest kid whose parents either don’t give a shit about their educations or have zero ability to get them transferred to a different school or classroom. And after three years of bad teachers, I bet I’d stop bothering to fill out the standardized tests, either, and would just spend the time doodling dragons all over the paper. That kids with zero educational support and extremely impoverished backgrounds end up doing badly in life really shouldn’t surprise us.

But because we are talking about having three particularly good or bad teachers in a row, only 1/125 students fall into either category. The vast majority of students–over 99%–get a variety of different teachers, and most teachers are decent.

Could bad teachers be concentrated in ghetto school districts? Perhaps they are–though remember, these districts are still paying their teachers more than the average Catholic school, so I doubt teacher pay is really the problem. And I’ve yet to hear anyone espouse an explanation for why ghetto schools supposedly attract bad teachers besides “bad pay.”

To be clear: we’ve denigrated and cast all teachers under suspicion and greatly interfered with their ability to run their classrooms all because teachers in the ghettos can’t raise their students’ test scores.

If a particular teacher is a real problem, let the parents of the students in that teacher’s class present their troubles to the school board and let the board make a determination.

6. SAT scores are just a product of your parents’ income.

SAT scores by race and parental income

Sorry the graph is small. The Y axis is SAT scores and the X axis is parental income.

The top line, dark orange, is Asian math scores. Dark blue = white math. Light blue = white verbal. Dark red = Mexican math. Black = black math. Light orange = Asian verbal. Pink = Mexican verbal. Grey = black verbal.

The richest black kids in the country have worse math scores than the poorest whites and Asians. The richest Mexicans have math scores on par with the poorest Asians and only slightly above working class whites. On verbal scores, blacks at all income levels score worse than their similarly-monied peers for whom English is most likely a second language.

And as we’ve already seen district funding doesn’t actually vary that much with parental income. Rich people do indeed pay for more tutoring and better teachers for their kids, but this is heavily confounded by the fact that smart people tend to go to college, get degrees, go into high-paying professions, and then have kids who are also pretty smart, while dumb people drop out of highschool, get shitty jobs, make very little money, and end up with kids who are similarly dumb.

7. More education will jump-start the economy and solve all woes.

Why are Asians harder hit by Recessions?

So I was just looking up some demographic data on Wikipedia and ran across this graph. Two interesting things:

1. During the recessions, all of the groups suffer in roughly similar amounts, except Asians, who tend to get really hammered. I don’t think it’s a side-effect of just having the biggest quantity of money, as whites and blacks, who make very different amounts of money, still tend to fall by the same amount. I would assume this is a result of Asians being more heavily leveraged, with risky investments, except that this is a graph of income rather than net worth. Maybe they are disproportionately employed in highly leveraged professions?
2. The 1990 recession looks like it went on particularly long for Hispanics, whose net worth kept hurting after everyone else’s had started recovering–around 1995, the Hispanic nadir, their net worth was nearly as low as African Americans’. What was up? Economic problems related to the Mexican Peso? Refugees from the Guatemalan Civil War? NAFTA?

Thoughts?

America: Unraveling at the Seams

It’s hard to concentrate on genetics when you feel like your own society is coming apart at the seams. I am very glad today that I am not in Dallas; I can only imagine what the people there (police and civilians,) must be feeling, but it can’t be good. Likewise, having seen the video of Philando Castile’s death, I am sure the African American community is likewise distressed.

From BLM to Donald Trump, racial tensions are on the rise and whites are usually blamed:

(This was tweeted the day after 9 police officers were shot, 5 killed, in Dallas.)

Or, more subtlely:

This post is not an exhaustive look at the dynamics of race and violence in America (I haven’t the time or resources,) but here are some links on the subject if you want them:

Slate Star Codex: Race and Justice: Much more than you wanted to know, (a review of just about everything on the subject Scott could find;) The Color of Crime, (2016 revised edition;) the Bureau of Justice crime stats website; and from the NY Times: Surprising New evidence shows bias in police use of force but not in shootings. And more, Study: BLM is wrong about police.

Rather, this is a quick look at the demographic reality vs the narrative:

Alton Sterling, a black man, was recently shot by police officer Howie Lake (white) and Blane Salamoni (medium-hued Italian.)

Philando Castile, (black) was recently shot by police officer Jeronimo Yanez, (Hispanic.)

George Zimmerman, (Hispanic) shot Trayvon Martin (black.)

The recent spree-killing at an Oregon college that killed (IIRC,) 7 people, was committed by a black man.

The Fort Hood Army Base shooting was committed by a Muslim man. The San Bernardino Christmas Party shooting, which IIRC killed 14 people, was committed by a Muslim couple.

The Orlando shooting, which left 49 people dead, was committed by a Muslim man; most of his victims were black and Hispanic. Most likely all of his victims were gay, (but apparently the shooter himself wasn’t. I am not totally convinced, though.)

6 police officers were involved in the death of Freddie Gray, black. Half of those officers were black, half white. The entire chain of command, from the Baltimore City police force to the Attorney General to the President himself is, of course, heavily black.

Police officer Peter Liang, Asian, killed Akai Gurley, black. The judge who threw out Liang’s guilty verdict, Danny Chun, is also Asian.

Mike Brown, black, was shot by a white cop.

Eric Gardner, black guy, strangled by white cops

Spree killer Eliot Roger was half Asian/half white.

The Virginia Tech shooter was Asian.

Mass-murderer Dylan Roof: white guy, black victims

Batman theater shooter: white guy, many victims

That guy who shot up a kindergarten was white. Victims weren’t chosen by race.

Violence by protestors (Hispanic, black, and white?) against Trump supporters (mostly white.)

In the recent anti-cop violence:

The five police officers recently shot by a black guy in Dallas included 4 whites and one Hispanic (Zamarripa.)

An Asian guy ambushed a police officer (I don’t know the victim’s race.)

A black guy ambushed two police offices (victims’ race unknown.)

Black guy attacked police officer’s home, officer’s race unknown.

Three police-related people + one civilian shot at a Michigan courthouse; 2 dead.

Why do people who think that whites are racist against minorities simultaneously try to increase immigration from non-white countries, instead of recommending that non-whites stay very far away? It doesn’t seem like Asians and Hispanics are refraining from shooting blacks, even if whites are the ones who get blamed for it.

Note that these are just the cases that have been prominent in the media/I have heard of/that come immediately to mind. The data, as you are probably aware, shows that most crime is of the far more conventional variety of black on black and white on white, but see all of the links above if you want real crime stats. Also, I have refrained from opining on guilt.

Forgive me; I forgot where this came from. Please let me know f you recognize it so I can properly credit it.

On overlapping bell curves and the irony of being an outsider

Suppose you have a population–we’ll call it PopA. PopA can be just about any group of people–farmers, classical music lovers, Ukrainians, women, etc. In any population, you’re going to get a range of traits (unless you’ve selected your population in some exact way). Farmers, for example, vary in the sizes and productivity of their farms; women vary in height and weight. Variation in many (though not all) traits can be modeled with a bell curve:

Take height: some people are very short, and some are very tall, but most cluster near their group’s average.

Where we have two (or more) groups, they must vary on the distribution of some trait/s. (Otherwise they would not be separate groups.) For example, the group of classical music lovers tends to listen to more classical music than the group of rap music lovers (who, in turn, tend to listen to more rap music.) Women, on average, are shorter than men. But few groups are absolutely distinct–there are some classical music lovers who also listen to some rap music, and rap fans who listen to a few classical compositions, just as there are men and women who are the same height.

Men and women arranged by height

A graph of male and female heights

In America, the biggest groups people tend to be aware of (or act like they are aware of) are gender and race:

Asians, whites, Hispanics, and blacks.

You can pick just about any trait to label this graph. We’ll use introversion/extraversion. Introverts are on the left; extroverts are on the right.

“Normal” people–that is average ones–tend to have, by definition, a lot of traits in common with the other people in their group. These folks fit in comfortably. For our example, a normal member of Group A, while more introverted than the national average, is perfectly at home among most other members of Group A. A normal member of Group C, while more extroverted than the national average, is perfectly happy among other members of Group C.

To be explicit: normies have it pretty good. They are constantly surrounded by people who are just like themselves. Outliers, by contrast, tend to be alone (and are often ostracized, bullied, or otherwise attacked by more normal people.)

The thing about traits is that they tend to cluster. People from Pakistan, for example, tend to be Muslim, speak Urdu + a second language, and have brown skin. People with a specific mutation of the EDAR gene–found primarily in east Asians–have thicker hair, more sweat glands, smaller breasts, and differently shaped teeth than people without it. People who like country music are more likely to be pro-life than people who like techno. Women tend to like handbags, diets, and babies, while men tend to like sports and cars.

If traits didn’t cluster, we wouldn’t have groups.

One of the results of this is that normal people on one bell curve probably won’t get along all that well with normal people on another bell curve. To use a somewhat simpler graph:

Normies A, B, and C get along well with normal people from their own groups, but tend not to get along all that well with normal people from other groups. Normie A, for example, is a perfectly normal introvert from group A, and finds most people from groups B and C way too extraverted and regards interacting with them as quite unpleasant. Normie C is a perfectly normal extravert from Group C, and finds most people from groups A and B way too introverted. Normie B thinks there are some perfectly reasonable members of Groups A and C, but that most As and Cs are extremists, and that both sides need to be more like B.

But this is not generally a problem, as normies can just hang out with other people from their own group, who tend to be like themselves.

Let’s talk about outliers:

Our outliers are, by definition, far from average. Our extremely extraverted member of Group A is simply way too extraverted for other As, and our introverted member of Group C doesn’t get on well with the average C at all. But our extraverted A gets on just fine with normal members of Group C, and our introverted C gets on fine with normal members of Group A.

Obviously my graphs have been rather arbitrarily chosen (actually, chosen for their ability to show up well on the screen rather than their accurate portrayal of the ethnic breakdown of introversion/extraversion.) It is easy to imagine traits that vary in all sorts of interesting ways between groups, depending on the shapes of their relative bell curves. Despite the limitations of my visuals, I hope the overall idea, however, is clear.

Anyway, this was all inspired by conversations/observations I was reading the other day on the kinds of people who enter into interracial marriages. No, I wasn’t reading Stormfront; these were perfectly mainstream-to-leftist people who probably approve of interracial marriage. For example, I have read several complaints from Asian women who say that they get a lot of attention from really creepy guys who have some kind of weird Asian fetish. (And here I just assumed that guys like Asian women because Asian women are less obese.) Another post, written by the (grown) child of an interracial couple, asserted that his dad had married interracially because he was too socially incompetent to attract a woman of his own race.

Harsh, but from the normie perspective, people who get along well with members of other races may in fact be outliers from their own, and are thus considered “socially incompetent.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, anecdotal observation of white women who marry black men suggests that they, too, are not “average,” but instead have a lot in common, personality-wise, with black men. They tend also to have more limited social opportunities due to poverty. (This should be a caution, by the way, for people trying to model the effects of racial admixture: admixture is unlikely to come from a random sample of the population, but to have been selected in some way.)

I feel like repeating here that even though normal people are harsh on outliers, does not automatically mean that being an outlier is morally reprehensible. Highly intelligent people and criminals are both outliers; very short and very tall people are outliers. Blind people and homosexuals are outliers. Outliers can be good, bad, or totally neutral. They’re just not normal, and normal people think that being normal is morally good, because they’re normal, and people default to thinking that they and people like them are good.

As I noted back in the post about adoption, 61% of whites say they’re okay with intermarriage, but only about 2% of them have mixed or other-race children, including step and adopted kids. Given the number of minorities in the country + random chance, about half of the whites who say they’re okay with intermarriage ought to have a mixed-race family–30% of whites, not 2%. Breaking it down by liberal vs. conservative doesn’t help–2% of conservative whites live in mixed-race families, vs. 2.4% of liberal whites, which is really not much of a difference to crow about.

Being okay with intermarriage is a normative value among whites (and probably other racial groups, too,) but differences in the distribution of personality traits may prevent most normal people from forming a lot of friendships (or romantic relationships) with people from different races. By contrast, outliers may get along better with people of other races. Ironically, this means that people whom normals might characterize as “racist” are likely to actually get along pretty well with people of other (or certain) races.

Hence why Derbyshire, a “white advocate,” is married to an Asian woman.

Is Race a Social Construct?

People mean a lot of things when they say “social construct.” Mostly they mean “made up.”

Luckily for us, Google is very helpful:

Dear Google and the NY Times: Not only is that not the biological definition of race, it’s not even the biological definition of SPECIES. This is not what laymen mean when they speak of race, not what racists mean when they speak of race, not what blacks or whites or Hindus mean, and definitely not anyone who actually studies human biology and genetics.

The simple folk definition of “race” is “a group of people who look kinda similar and come from the same large area of the world.” This, of course, absolutely exists. Most people in the world look a lot like their neighbors, especially if they live in their ancestral homeland and their country hasn’t been invaded lately.

Now, the exact details of how you racially classify people–are Hindus Caucasian? How about North Africans and Iranians? What about mixed-race people?–are socially constructed. This mean that a word like “black” may mean something different in Russian than it does in the Dominican Republic than it does in the US.

This does not change the underlying reality–the humans referred to as “black” still possess the quality of looking similar to other people from their ancestral part of the world. Reality does not disappear just because people sometimes disagree on exactly how to use words to define it.

The scientific, biological definition of race gets a little more complicated, since it matters whether we are talking abut chromosomal races, fungal races, or humans. A couple of definitions:

Geographical race

A distinct population that is isolated in a particular area from other populations of a species,^[9] and consistently distinguishable from the others,^[9] e.g. morphology (or even only genetically^[4]). Geographic races are allopatric.^[7]

Physiological race

A group of individuals that do not necessarily differ in morphology from other members of the species, but have identifiably different physiology or behaviour.^[10] A physiological race may be an ecotype, part of a species that is adapted to a different local habitat, defined even by a specific food source.^[11]

Notice that neither of these include, “possessing a gene or cluster of genes common to everyone in the race but to no one outside of it.”

But if you don’t like the Wikipedia, here’s what Biology Reference has to say:

The biological definition of race is a geographically isolated breeding population that shares certain characteristics in higher frequencies than other populations of that species, but has not become reproductively isolated from other populations of the same species. (A population is a group of organisms that inhabit the same region and interbreed.) Human racial groups compose a number of breeding units that in the past remained geographically and perhaps temporally isolated, yet could interbreed and produce viable offspring within the species Homo sapiens sapiens.

The Biology-Online Dictionary has some more definitions.

These races are real things, even if biologists disagree about exactly which race a mushroom should belong to.

The reality on the ground:

There are few truly isolated groups in the world, though the Onge (and most likely the Sentinelese) actually fit the NY Times’s wacky definition of a “race” due to thousands of years of isolation on tiny islands in the middle of nowhere:

From Haak et al.

The Onge are the peach stripe between the olive brown section and the purple section.

Major groups in this dataset, running from left to right (excluding the ancient skeletons at the far left):

Light Green: Brazilian rainforest dwellers who may be most closely related to Melanesians

Light Pink: Aztecs and their relatives

Brown: Canadian Indians

Green: Bushmen/San

Rose: North-East Africans

Dusty Blue: Bantus

Light Blue: Pygmies

Magenta: Tanzanian hunter-gatherers

Orange/Blue/Teal: Europeans

Orange/Purple/Teal: Middle Easterners

Olive Brown: Inuit (Eskimo)

Peach: Onge

Purple: PNG/Australia (Melanesians and Aborigines)

Light Green/Teal: India

Yellow/Red: East Asia

Yellow: Taiwan

Red: Siberia

Some of these groups have very mixed ancestries; people from eastern Canada or the middle of Eurasia, for example. Others are quite distinct–there is no doubt that the Eskimo and Pygmies are genetically distinct, physically distinct, geographically distinct, behave differently, and do not generally marry each other.

We may argue about whether Turks should be considered “Europeans” or “Middle Easterners,” or perhaps say that all orange people should be grouped together, or all teal or blue, but here geography does its job: Europeans look genetically like other Europeans; Indians look genetically like other Indians; Middle Easterners look like each other (except for Bedouins,) etc.

We may also argue about how many races we want to distinguish–people usually determine races based on whichever people are around, but obviously the world is more complicated than this. Americans generally think of “African Americans” as part of a broader race that includes all Africans, but we have distinguished here between 5 different groups, some of which are quite distinct–the ancestors of today’s Pygmies and Bantus, for example, split apart about 100,000 years ago, whereas the ancestors of today’s Bantu’s and Koreans split about 70,000 years ago (as far as we know.) Most African Americans are genetically Bantu (with a bit of European admixture,) not Pygmy. We might in a folk-sense refer to both of these groups as “Africans” or “black,” but genetically (and behaviorally) they are distinct.

Of course, you do not have to call them “races.” Most people studying human genetics use terms like “population,” “ethnic group,” “ethny,” or “clade” instead, but the practical meaning is the same.

But the idea that groups that are genetically, physically, behaviorally, or geographically distinct or distinguishable from each other do not exist is pure nonsense.

African Americans, Hispanics, and longevity

I’ve known for a while that women live longer than men, Hispanic Americans live longer than Euro Americans, and the oldest people in the US are disproportionately black:

At 116 years old, Susannah Mushatt Jones is not only the oldest woman in the US, but also the entire world.

One theory I considered was that higher infant mortality rates in Mexico (I don’t actually know the infant mortality rates in Mexico, this is just an idea,) results in the deaths of premature infants and others with severe health problems, whereas in the US these infants survive for several years–maybe even decades–before dying. The population of Hispanic immigrants, therefore, does not include these children–they’re already gone–but the US population does. This could result in a higher life expectancy among the immigrants than among non-immigrants.

But what about women and blacks? Their infant mortality would be included in the native rates, and even if worse medical care resulted in higher infant mortality among them, this still wouldn’t explain why so many supercentenarians are black.

While researching hippocampi yesterday, I ran across an article about hippocampal volumes in the elderly: Brain Morphology in Older African Americans, Caribbean Hispanics, and Whites From Northern Manhattan

We already know that different people age at different rates, but it appears as well that different races age at different rates, with black brains aging the slowest:

“Results of the regression analysis revealed significant effects of age, sex, vascular disease history, and race/ethnicity on relative brain volume (F_5,685 = 38.290, P < .001). For each additional year in age, there was an associated 0.3% decrease in relative brain volume (β = −0.003, t = 10.34, P < .001) (Figure 2). Relative brain volume among women was 2% larger than that among men (β = 0.02, t = 5.93, P < .001). Hispanic (β = 0.03, t = 7.20, P < .001) and African American (β = 0.02, t = 4.09, P < .001) participants had 2.8% and 1.6% larger relative brain volumes than white subjects, respectively. Finally, for each additional vascular disease, there was a 0.5% associated reduction in relative brain volume (β = −0.005, t = −2.70, P < .001). When interaction terms were entered into the model, none were significant, demonstrating that the association of vascular disease history and age with relative brain volume did not differ across race/ethnicity or sex. Analysis of variance controlling for age and vascular disease history confirmed main effects of sex (F_1,685 = 34.906, P < .001) and race/ethnicity (F_2,685 = 23.528, P < .001) but no sex × race/ethnicity interaction (F_2,685 = 0.167, P =.85) (Figure 3).“

Relative brain volume across racial/ethnic groups and by sex.

relationship among chronologic age, race/ethnicity, and relative brain volume.

 

So why are white males (at least in these samples) aging so quickly?

I made some graphs for you

Graph of homicide rates vs fertility rates (data from the Wikipedia)

 

Log. graph of homicide rates vs. fertility rates

I tried to label as many points as I could, but the dense cluster in the lower left was too much of a pain to label. Most of it’s the Euro countries.

We’ll discuss these later.

Bullying pt 2: Race, Crime, and the Police

This is part two on bullying as an emergent social/political behavior and an exploration of the basic thesis that in a dispute between two people, elites will justify or outright lie about violence toward the lower status individual. For a longer explanation, see Part 1: Everything Adults say about Bullying is Bullshit.

Let’s start with this graph, helpfully supplied by Slate Star Codex’s extensively researched article, Race and Justice: much more than you wanted to know, but originally from Mother Jones Magazine:

“I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” said Ms. Morrison, who also has won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, which includes the bestsellers “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.” “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”

(From the Washington Times, “Police kill more whites than blacks, but minority deaths generate more outrage“)

(Source: Washington Post )

Welp. That took all of 5 seconds to find via Google. Does Ms. Morrison not own a computer? Or is she ignorant by choice?

The Mother Jones data (above) records not a single white who shot at the NYC police, yet whites were 20% of those shot by the police. Approximately 70% of the people who actually tried to shoot a police officer were black, but only about 40% of those shot by the police were black. Hispanics make up about 30% of those who shot at the police, and 40% of those shot by the police.

In other words, NYC police officers appear to be preferentially shooting whites and Hispanics, not blacks.

Even when we compare the “fired upon by police” bar vs the “struck by police” bar, we notice that the police seem to be much better shots when shooting at whites than at blacks. When they shoot at blacks, they appear to be trying not to actually hit them, whereas they appear to have no such compunctions when shooting at whites.

So where are all of the protests and marches for whites and Hispanics murdered by the police? Does even Stormfront give enough of a shit about murdered whites to block a highway or steal a microphone?

But that is just Mother Jones and the WaPo. What stats do other folks cite?

“Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use figures from the website Killed by Police. …

“Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.

““If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos. …

“Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use figures from the website Killed by Police. Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races. …

“Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.

“If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and author of the book “Cop in the Hood.”

But do others agree with Mr. Moskos’s numbers?

“The investigative journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage in an Oct. 10 article, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.

“The fact-checking website PolitiFact concluded in August 2014 that police kill more whites than blacks after the claim was made by conservative commentator Michael Medved. PolitiFact cited data from the Centers for Disease Control on fatal injuries by “legal intervention” from 1999 to 2011.

“Over the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct,” said PolitiFact.”

(Quotes from the Washington Times article.)

But anyone who says, “All Lives Matter” (or “White and Hispanic lives matter,”) is, of course, a terrible racist. Thankfully, I’ve found a helpful article to sort out why for us: The next time someone says ‘all lives matter,’ show them these 5 paragraphs

“Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!”

So, the article is saying that we should be out in the streets marching and protesting about the preferential killing of whites and Hispanics by the police? Because this is, of course, what the data actually shows.

But what about that pesky matter, crime?

The Baltimore Sun has a widget that lets you see where all of the homicides in Baltimore have been committed since 2007:

All Baltimore homicides in 2014

Baltimore Homicides as of August 13, 2015

I’m guessing the year’s total will come out somewhere around 280, breaking the general trend of falling homicide rates.

Baltimore isn’t alone:

“Milwaukee, which last year had one of its lowest annual homicide totals in city history, recorded 84 murders so far this year, more than double the 41 it tallied at the same point last year. …

“The number of murders in 2015 jumped by 33% or more in Baltimore, New Orleans and St. Louis. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, the homicide toll climbed 19% and the number of shooting incidents increased by 21% during the first half of the year.”

But sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words:

 

I’m going to quote a few bits from the Slate Star Codex article linked at the top:

“Then I found a huge review paper on the subject, written by a Harvard professor of sociology, which concluded after analyzing sixty pages of exquisitely-researched studies that:

“‘Recognizing that research on criminal justice processing in the United States is complex and fraught with methodological problems, the weight of the evidence reviewed suggests the following. When restricted to index crimes, dozens of individual-level studies have shown that a simple direct influence of race on pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled. For these crimes, racial differentials in sanctioning appear to match the large racial differences in criminal offending. Findings on the processing of adult index crimes therefore generally support the non-discrimination thesis.’ …

“Police records consistently show that black people are arrested at disproportionally high rates (compared to their presence in the population) for violent crimes. For example, blacks are arrested eight times more often for homicide and fourteen times more often for robbery. Even less flashy crimes show the same pattern: forgery, fraud, and embezzlement all hover around a relative risk of four. …

“The second hypothesis has been strongly supported by crime victimization surveys, which show that the percent of arrestees who are black matches very closely matches the percent of victims who say their assailant was black. This has been constant throughout across thirty years of crime victmization surveys. …

“Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date. … Older national data skews more toward the New York City side with little evidence of racial bias, but I don’t know of any recent studies which have compared the race of shooting victims to the race of dangerous attackers on a national level. There is no support for the contention that white officers are more likely than officers of other races to shoot black suspects. …

“a more recent Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 66% of accused blacks get prosecuted compared to 69% of accused whites; 75% of prosecuted blacks get convicted compared to 78% of prosecuted whites. …

“Summary: Most recent studies suggest a racial sentencing disparity of about 15%, contradicting previous studies that showed lower or no disparity. Changes in sentencing guidelines are one possible explanation; poorly understood methodological differences are a second. Capital punishment still sucks.”

But don’t just take my word for it; go read Scott’s whole post. Obviously he put a lot of effort into it.

What do our elites have to say on the subject? Other than, of course, calling for a “National conversation on race?”

Presidential hopeful and US Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign website helpfully explains his thoughts on the matter:

“Issues: Racial Justice

“We must pursue policies that transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of its people of color. That starts with addressing the four central types of violence waged against black and brown Americans: physical, political, legal and economic.

“Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Samuel DuBose. We know their names. Each of them died unarmed at the hands of police officers or in police custody. The chants are growing louder. People are angry and they have a right to be angry. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that this violence only affects those whose names have appeared on TV or in the newspaper. African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. …”

CNN weighs in on the Bernie Sanders/Black Lives Matter incidents:

“Many observers are perplexed by the decision of some Black Lives Matter activists to twice disrupt attempted addresses by presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Well, I am not perplexed. The new generation of civil rights activists never accepted “trickle-down economics” from conservatives. Today they are rejecting “trickle-down justice” from the liberals. …

“But we have needed and wanted more. Our economic problems include an unemployment rate that is double that of whites, racially biased policing and court systems, predatory lenders who deliberately target black neighborhoods and public schools that expel black children at staggering rates for minor offenses. …

“Sometimes, it seemed some Democratic politicians were happy to publicly name and embrace every part of the Democratic coalition — immigrants rights defenders, womens’ rights advocates, environmentalists and champions of LBGT equality. But not black people.”

Yes, clearly the one thing Democrats fail to talk about is Black people. Really, I’ve hardly heard anyone talking about black people and their issues for the past few decades. Maybe during the LBJ administration there was some talk about black people, but that was ages ago.

“In case anyone missed the memo after Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston, here it is: the Obama era of black silence on issues that matter to us is over.”

That’s what you call “silence”?

“It turns out the Seattle activists’ actions were aimed less at Sanders himself and more at racist practices and policies being tolerated by local liberals in a supposed progressive bastion like Seattle. The Seattle Police Department has been under investigation for years for racist scandals and problematic use of force. Black children in King County schools are suspended at higher rates than their white peers. And the region is wasting $210 million on a new jail instead of investing in communities. … any fair discussion of “income inequality” must necessarily include a denunciation of our racially biased criminal justice system. Always.”

Time Magazine weighs in with, “Bernie Sanders Is Wrong To Ignore ‘Black Lives Matter.’” I don’t think I need to quote fro the article for you to get the gist, but I’m going to, anyway:

“This is the Civil Rights Movement Part II, and our leaders should want to get in on the side that promotes human rights—full stop. … You cannot look at a group of people living in fear and dying in droves and tell them they are protesting incorrectly. It’s easy to sit back and critique the method when it isn’t your life on the line. But if someone were being choked, the last thing they would need is a passerby saying, “I’d love to help you out. But could you at least say “please?” Convince me why I should save your life, and do it politely.” White people have the time and the luxury to wait for the system we created to work in our favor.”

Also:

 

How about Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton? MSNBC reports, “Hillary Clinton: ‘Yes, black lives matter’“:

“Attempting to soar where her rivals have recently floundered on issues of racial justice, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd of nearly 400 in South Carolina Thursday and said unequivocally: “Yes, black lives matter. …

“Last weekend, black activists interrupted a presidential candidate forum at the Netroots Nation conference … O’Malley has since apologized for adding “white lives matter, all lives matter” to the protesters’ calls.

On a larger scale, however, the exchange targeted the progressive movement as a whole for allowing racial justice issues to fade into the background.”

There’s that “we haven’t been talking about race lately” idea again.

CNN tells us that “Clinton meets with #BlackLivesMatter protesters after they were barred from her event,” but notes in the article that,

“…the protesters showed up slightly before the event started and, according to the Clinton campaign, were not allowed into the main event because the room has been shut down due to capacity by the United States Secret Service.

“A Secret Service agent on site confirmed this to CNN.”

How about those evil racists on the Republican side?

Well, here’s a quote from Rand Paul’s campaign-launching speech:

“I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed.”

So… Rand Paul wants to repeal almost the entire body of criminal law, including homicide and rape? I confess to being not particularly impressed with whatever train of thought produced this promise.

Even the Harvard Crimson weighs in, with perspectives from some of America’s future (and current) movers and shakers:

 

“The Naked Truth: Black Lives Matter“

“In our stern voices, we chanted: “Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!”

“Confused, boisterous, and starkly naked, they replied: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

“During this year’s Primal Scream, we were a part of a group of students who stood in front of Hollis Hall as part of a peaceful protest in response to the recent non-indictment of Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, police officers who are responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, respectively.

“With the support of the administration, we hoped to delay primal scream with a 4.5-minute moment of silence, symbolic of the 4.5 hours that Brown’s body lay on the street after his death. Black lives matter, and we wanted to engage the larger Harvard community on some of the most salient issues of our time: systemic racism, oppression, and brutality on black and brown bodies. And yet, to our dismay, the efforts of several administrators who rallied for students to respect the moment of silence were muted by the chanting of the naked mass.”

In case it’s not obvious, “Primal Scream” is one of those old-school college traditions in which (probably drunk) students strip naked and run through Harvard Yard at midnight on the night before finals. Oh, and it’s in the dead of winter, which means it’s really fucking cold. Probably not the best time to try to get a hundred or so drunk, naked people get on board with an agenda of standing around in the cold for a few minutes.

“Demonstrators Continue ‘Black Lives Matter Campaign’ in Central Square March“

“More than 200 demonstrators poured onto the streets of Central Square in Cambridge Wednesday evening, extending a series of marches and protests both nationwide and in the Greater Boston Area against racial prejudice in the criminal justice system.

“This is just a continuation,” Divinity School student Rachel A. Foran said, clutching a sign on which read “White silence is state violence.” Foran, like others at the event, emphasized the need for uniting in protest following two separate non-indictments of white police officers late last year who killed unarmed black men. …

“Along the way, organizers handed off a milk crate podium to one another as they invited individuals to decry prejudices against African American men and implore Cambridge residents to join the movement.”

I think Central Square, Cambridge is significantly blacker than Harvard.

“Iconic Revolutions: Art and Protest at Harvard”

“The energies that fuel art are similar to the ones that power politico-economic movements, and the line between the two can often blur. The protest can be considered a form of performance art, and movements at Harvard and beyond have utilized the intersection between the two. …

“Harvard is in a unique position within the genre of protest-performance art, organizers say. And since Harvard is constantly scrutinized by the media, revolutionary art produced on Harvard’s campus—protest-based or otherwise—has unusual reach and staying power.

“PERFORMING PROTESTS

“Harvard is familiar with the tradition of performance art as a form of protest. For instance, Divest Harvard, a group that calls for Harvard to divest from fossil fuel companies, recently used a tactic that showcases performance art: They initiated the Divest Harvard Fast, a hunger strike in all but name. The hunger strike is an age-old tactic, used by groups ranging from suffragettes to Indian nationalists to Cuban dissidents. The act of fasting has a peculiar evocative power to it: an asceticism that brings up images of emaciated fakirs and a willingness to use the body as a canvas, a la Marina Abramovic.”

I am reminded here of Nydwracu’s recent post detailing the Harvard Crimson’s long support of the Khmer Rouge, well-known for being one of history’s most genocidal regimes, which you really should read:

“If the American government were sincere about wanting peace in Cambodia, it would stop supporting a repressive dictatorship, and allow the people of Cambodia — represented by the Khmer Rouge and the supporters of the deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk — to determine their own destiny,”

and of Slate Star Codex’s recent review of “Chronicles of Wasted Time,” the memoirs of a liberal journalist who got his wish to visit Stalin’s utopia, witnessed Holodomor first-hand, and then couldn’t get anyone back home to publish his articles about it or pretty much anything that wasn’t uplifting lies about the awesomeness of the USSR, which you should also read:

“He is reduced to sending secret messages at the bottoms of people’s suitcases, only to find to his horror that even when they successfully reach the Guardian offices back in Britain, his bosses have no interest in publishing them because they offend the prejudices of its progressive readership. …

“The plan goes without a hitch, he passes himself off as a generic middle-class Soviet, and he ends up in Ukraine right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Famine. He describes the scene – famished skeletons begging for crumbs, secret police herding entire towns into railway cars never to be seen again. At great risk to himself, he smuggles notes about the genocide out of the country, only to be met – once again – with total lack of interest. Guardian readers don’t look at the newspapers to hear bad things about the Soviet Union! Guardian readers want to hear about how the Glorious Future is already on its way! He is quickly sidelined in favor of the true stars of Soviet journalism, people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Russia correspondent, who wrote story after story about how prosperous and happy and well-fed the Soviets were under Stalin, and who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his troubles.”

Speakerpedia claims that Tim Wise commands a $10,000 speaker’s fee to lecture about White Privilege to college students (and other groups) across the country; he has apparently spoken at over 800 colleges. Does anyone ever get invited to speak about black crime, the targeting of whites and Hispanics by the police, or black on white crime at universities? I bet Jared Taylor would speak for free.

Black Lives Matter has the official support of Harvard University, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Twitter, and the mass media establishment.

(No, seriously this is what the inside of the Twitter headquarters looks like:

Source, source.)

Everyone lies. All the damn time. Most lies are completely inconsequential, of course, but lying about who is murdering whom seems like the kind of lie that could result in real consequences: people dying. But even to mention the truth in public carries serious consequences: ostracization, loss of job, harassment, banning, etc. Only low-class losers care about crime against whites; rich people, of course, have no such petty concerns. Maybe because they can live in million dollar neighborhoods where the gates/ferry rides “keep out the riff-raff.”

Whose lies are believed? Whose are not?

 

Conclusions: The police and whites who worry about getting killed (or get killed) are low-status. Blacks and wealthy whites who proclaim how much they love blacks are high-status.

 

Does this sound counter-intuitive?

Why? Socially, blacks are more popular than whites.

As I noted yesterday,

“White people want to have black friends; it lets them prove to themselves (and others) just how non-racist they are. It makes them feel better about themselves and assuages some portion of guilt. To have a black friend makes a white person feel like a good white person. …

“Black people, by contrast, have no particular desire to prove how non-racist they are.”

The imbalance puts whites in a position of lower social value, attempting to get social status via black approval. But don’t just take my word for it. Remember that article in the New Yorker about the Vermont couple who adopted 20 kids?

“All the teen-ages were nervous about being black in Vermont, but Fisher and Lilly were wildly popular in high school. Lilly was a track star, and Fisher was cool and good-looking.

“Fisher: I was popular. It went to my head, I won’t lie to you. All the little white girls saw I was the best dancer in the school, and I was the only black guy.”

Fisher dropped out of college, got three girls pregnant and went to prison for beating one of them.

Were you popular enough with women to have three kids before your mid-twenties?

Newsweek has an interesting article on childhood popularity and race: By Third Grade, Black Students who Self-Segregate are more Popular:

“In NEWSWEEK magazine this week, we suggested that part of the problem [racial self-segregation among students] stems from white parents’ refusal to talk to their young children about race and ethnicity. This inadvertently teaches children that race is a taboo topic. …

“Nevertheless, the scholars are finding stunning racial patterns in the kids’ responses. They found that black kids who self-segregate ─ who only hang out with other blacks ─ are more popular than black kids who have white friends.

“This means that an average black student could increase her popularity by hanging out with other black students. Meanwhile, if she chooses to have white friends, she could put her popularity at risk. Many kids don’t have the social capital or confidence to make this tradeoff.

“When the scholars ran the analysis a second time, substituting how much kids were liked for how popular they were, a similar troubling pattern emerged. Black kids who self-segregated were liked by more black children. Having white friends decreased a black child’s “likeability” ─ at least in the eyes of other black children.

“For white children, in contrast, self-segregating hurt their popularity. …

“Overall, black students were more popular than white students. And both the white and black kids in his study agreed which black kids were popular.”

Newsweek concludes the article by claiming,

“Twenty or thirty years ago, no black kids would have been seen as popular by white kids ─ and few black kids would have had social influence. Black kids would not have been setting the social standard, school-wide. Now they are.”

Really?

In “Blacks in the White Establishment,” Zweigenhaft and Dumhoff write about the effects of the ABC program–A Better Chance of Andover–established in 1967 to give scholarships to black and other minority students so they can attend Andover High School:

 “Perry’s study found that ABC students felt themselves to be popular. In fact, in response to an item asking, “How popular do you think you are in school this year in comparison with all the other students in your grade,” black ABC students indicated they felt more popular than did a control group of white students at their schools. (More than one-third of the black respondents felt themselves to be among “the most popular” and less than one-tenth thought themselves to be among “the least popular.”)

“Not only were black ABC students popular, they were also valued as leaders in dealing with teachers and administrators. … the student body of 840 students (40 of whom were black) surprised many people (including the faculty, the administration, the New York Times, and, most likely, themselves) by electing blacks as presidents of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes for the 1969-70 academic year. As the New York Times breathlessly and historically informed its readers, Andover, “the alma mater of the Lees and Washingtons of Virginia and the Quincys and Lowells of New England, has elected three Negro students from the ghettos of Chicago and Oakland as class presidents for 1969-70.” (Bold mine)

Of course, 1969 is 40 years before the Newsweek article was published, not 20-30, so perhaps black kids got a lot less popular sometime between the 60s and the 80s. Or maybe Newsweek just employees people who want certain fictions to be true.

Here’s another study on the same subject, with the same findings, African American and European American Children in Diverse Elementary Classrooms: Social Integration, Social Status, and Social Behavior:

“African American—but not European American—children had more segregated relationships and were more disliked by cross-ethnicity peers when they had fewer same-ethnicity classmates. African American children’s segregation was positively associated with same-ethnicity social preference and perceived popularity and with cross-ethnicity perceived popularity. European American children’s segregation was positively associated with same-ethnicity social preference but negatively associated with cross-ethnicity social preference and perceived popularity.”

Normal humans are perfectly aware of what would be impolitic to claim: from Yahoo Answers, Why are “blacks” considered more popular in any school?

“I’ve been to many different middle schools and highschools (we moved alot for dad’s job) and it always seemed as though blacks are more “popular” than anyone else in the school?

“My area is majority white…and most of the Black people at my school(and there isn’t a lot) are quite popular. Same with a lot of the Asian kids at my school.

“Well usually I feel as though they have more culture…I don’t know.. more fun then just and I am not trying to “Generalize” the american girl population, but most of us are annoying slutty brats, who just want to take pictures all the time in the same god damn position.

“We’re just always expected to be cool and popular, honestly…and it’s just that most blacks are raised to be more outgoing, so it carries on with them through school. I get along with most people, but I’m not that popular.

“the blacks in my school tend to be popular because some of them make trouble.  Source(s): im black,and im not popular”

The general explanation for black crime (if you get one at all) is that blacks feel bad because of racism, they have low self-esteem, they’re unpopular, people are constantly mean to them, they suffer microaggressions, etc.

The “self esteem” racket is quite a thing, and has been going on for quite a while (since the ’80s, at least). I recently happened across a treasure trove of old books a former kindergarten teacher was giving away for free because she was retiring, and gratefully took the whole stack. Many of the books were on the expected topics of “Kindergarten is awesome” and the ABCs, but a substantial subset were books aimed at raising black self-esteem, such as, “I Like Myself”

Actually, there were two copies of this book in the stack.

Here’s a page from the book:

People the MC would not like to be: a baby, an old woman, or a police officer–all white.

And another page:

Remember, whites get bullied more than black kids, but how many books do you think you can find in the average kindergarten class depicting a white kid being bullied by a black kid, and encouraging the white kid to be proud of themself?

Black Girl Dangerous helpfully reminds us:

“Teach your kids to constantly question the media’s narratives, especially about black people, including what stories the media tells and doesn’t tell, what images they show and don’t show, and the ways that black people and other people of color are made less than human by the media, while white people, even mass murderers, are allowed full humanity. Point out to them the differences in headlines and language used to describe people of color vs. white people and make sure they understand the motives behind them.”

The Cosby Show must have been really hard on her self-esteem.

Of course, the whole self-esteem business is a canard; popular kids have high self-esteem. From Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan (2004):

“More recent findings have documented that Blacks have higher self-esteem than Whites (Adams, 2003; Crocker & Lawrence, 1999; Crocker, Luhtanen, Blaine, & Broadnax, 1994; Harris & Stokes, 1978; Gray-Little & Hafdahl, 2000; Milkie, 1999; Porter & Washington, 1979; Rosenberg & Simmons, 1972; Simmons, 1978; Taylor & Walsh, 1979; Tashakkori, Thompson, Wade, & Valente, 1990; Twenge & Crocker, 2002). …

“By the 1970s, a majority of empirical studies found that Blacks had high self-esteem (Simmons, 1978; Taylor & Walsh, 1979; Rosenberg & Simmons, 1972; Harris & Stokes, 1978; Porter & Washington, 1979). Cross (1991) also reviewed studies published from 1968 to1980, and found that 74% of the studies reported that Blacks had equal or higher self-esteem than Whites. …

“a plethora of quantitative and qualitative studies have reported that Black adolescent girls consistently present high self-esteem scores (Adams, 2003; Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1999; Brodsky, 1999; Brown et al., 1998; Dukes & Martinez, 1994; Gray-Little & Hafdahl, 2000; Makkar & Strube, 1995; Milkie, 1999; Twenge & Crocker, 2002). In an empirical review of race comparative research published from 1980-2000, Adams (2003) found that 23 of 26 studies reported that Black girls had higher self-esteem than White girls. Black adolescent girls may be facing difficult circumstances but they consistently rate higher on self-esteem than any other racial group (Twenge & Crocker, 2002).”

 

Meanwhile, Pistol-whipped detective says he didn’t shoot attacker because of headlines:

“A Birmingham, Alabama, police detective who was pistol-whipped unconscious said Friday that he hesitated to use force because he didn’t want to be accused of needlessly killing an unarmed man. …

“”We don’t want to be in the media,” he said. “It’s hard times right now for us.” …

“Adding insult to injury: several bystanders, instead of helping, took pictures of the bloodied officer as he was facedown on the concrete and posted the images on social media, where the officer was mocked. …

“”Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” one user wrote, employing the hashtag #FckDaPolice. Another mockingly offered the officer milk and cookies for his “nap time.””

 

Who has status in America?

Black reactions to white people tanning

As I promised yesterday, I found the reactions on this post: Darkness Matters, to the phenomenon of white people using Melanotan II to, well, tan rather interesting. Her are a few quotes:

“Dr. Bey explained why whites have so much aggression, anger and hatred towards us and how they are planning to wipe us clean off the map. What I’m about to say is going to shock you. In the words of Booker T. Coleman, “Don’t believe anything I say. Do your own research. I could be lying to you.” Whites are kidnapping us, melting down our organs, cutting open our skulls and eating our pineal gland in order to become “powerful” and injecting our melanin into themselves.”

You know, I had not even considered cannibalism as a possible method for getting a tan. Also, I think she missed the part where it’s a fake hormone made in a lab that isn’t even identical to the real one in your body (and technically, it’s not fake melanin, but fake a-MSH.)

Some of the comments on the post are equally interesting:

“Not to forget mentioning the Rhesus Negative Blood type. Having learnt a lot about it (my mother is this blood type and I’m sure a lot of you know that it is the oldest blood type on this planet), it is no surprise to me that this, besides the melanin, could be why Caucasian ‘celebs’ are snatching up Black babies QUICK. It’s the cure. Even if the Caucasians are calling it the ‘Anunnaki blood type’.
They are trying to graft themselves back in because – and this could not be stressed enough, they’re fully aware that their time is up. …”

Actually, blacks tend to be Rh positive, like virtually everyone else on the planet. Rh negative blood is only found in >10% of people in Europeans. So, no, Europeans aren’t stealing black babies to get Rh negative blood. That’d be like stealing blacks to get blond hair.

Anunnaki? Or you can delve into the truly crazy shit.

Okay, I just want to pause here and issue a PSA on behalf of all whites, everywhere: No, we aren’t eating your brains. We don’t want to eat your brains. Or your skin. That’s disgusting. Also, this Anunnaki bullshit is pure crazypants. 99.99% of whites do not believe this. For goodness sakes.

Back to the comments.

“the blood bank won’t stop calling me and always trying to tell me that there is a blood shortage. They ask if, you could like to have your blood go to sicklwe [sic] cell children. I have found that they put a little mark on it so it is used for particular people.
They also run genetic test on your blood when you donate it and they have you sign away rights kind of alla Henretta Lacks. I’ve had one of them say that my blood helped people get well faster and that I should donate as much as possible. This has freaked me out and I haven’t been back since. I’m thinking of changing my phone number as I know they can track you through your cell phone using GPS. I don’t plan on being snatched.” (my bold)

“… I always told my family that whenever you see missing black kids that are posted on the news or on the board at Walmart, they are in underground slave camps and will be used for experiments. They are preying on the weak.”

“Do you think that maybe the babies are their own insurance policies to keep them alive if, the need a pigment fix. Do you think they would have their children drained of their blackness for such a thing?”

“And those abandoned warehouses, university hospitals that are Khazar funded, like NYU, LONG island Jewish, Columbia, Etc…are where they conduct experiments.”

Who are the Khazars, you’re wondering? “The Khazar theory” is a now-disproven theory of Ashkenazi Jewish origins favored principally by anti-Semites, Neo-Nazis, and people who don’t know any better. (We know it’s been disproven because we have genetic testing, and it turns out that the Askenazim are half Italian, half Middle Eastern, with no Khazar blood.) The one bit of truth to the idea is the fact that there was once a Jewish Khazar state, but it later converted to Islam, and thus it became rather lacking in Jews.

“Whites have always lusted after melanin, which explains their obsession with black sexuality. Whitewomen allowing random blackmen to impregnate them with a half-black baby with the consent of their white boyfriends and husbands. White female celebrities adopting black babies from Haiti and various countries across Africa, and so forth. What are white folks trying to accomplish? They want to mold black and half-black babies into white people under the guise of multiculturalism.”

“I think Dr. Llaila Afrika posited that the study of melanin is the ONLY thing they are doing in science nowadays & I believe he is right.”

“I notice they push the interracial agenda.Just look at paula paton and robin thicke.She is biracial but says she’s black and their child looks white he has blonde hair and blue eyes.This is what they are trying to do breed out the black race and replace it with a more fertile and tanner lookin white race.”

“Victoria Rowell is another mixed blackwoman that birthed a white daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she had the nerve to say her daughter is black by extension because she’s a black female…Insanity! Halle Berry is another stupid mixed blackwoman playing games with our bloodlines. Stacey Dash is half-black and half-mexican…all of her children have white fathers. Yet, she wants to portray herself as a black female. All of these women want blackmen to support their careers, and ignore the “Elephant In The Room.” They have white babies. Our race gains nothing by the likes of Tamera Mowry birthing white babies with whitemen…Nothing!”

” I’ve always known that something was amiss but couldn’t out my finger on it. You know when I “woke up”? When 9/11 hit. A friend of mine gave me The Protocols in school and while I did read it, It didn’t really register. When 9/11 happened, something clicked for me. Then I began to feel different. TV became a nuisance and my mind wasn’t clouded with football and music videos and clothes and shopping. I wanted more but couldn’t place what that was. When someone introduced me to some radio stations that talked about blacks and our sad state of affairs, I wept. At last!!! I’m not crazy after all.”

Honestly, I think combining Melanin Theory and Nazi propaganda is kind of weird.

(According to melanin theorist Wade Nobles, “That in the evolution of the species, in what some people call the Ontogenetic evolution of humankind, that in the evolution of the species the human family separated in a sense that one branch of the family stopped its evolutionary path and simply depended upon the central nervous system as the total machinery for understanding reality. Whereas, the root of the family continued its path and not only evolved a central nervous system but developed what I called at that time an essential melanic system. And that I even went so far as to try to develop a little formula and suggested that CNS + EMS = HB. CNS (Central Nervous System) + EMS (Essential Melanic System) = HB (Human Being). That the central nervous system combined with the essential melanic system is what makes you human. That, in fact, to be human is to be Black. To be human is to be Black.” From the Wikipedia.)

The whole post and comments are kind of like the Precious Bodily Fluids scene in Dr. Strangelove:

There was also a reference in the thread to the Night Doctors, so I looked them up on Wikipedia:

“Night Doctors, also known as night riders, night witches, Ku Klux doctors, and student doctors are bogeymen of African American folklore who emerged from the realities of grave robbing, medical experimentation, and intimidation rumors spread by Southern whites to prevent workers from leaving for the North. …In order to further emphasize the rumors, white owners would dress in white sheets to represent kidnappers. They wandered the African American communities to make them believe that they would be abducted, taken to medical facilities and killed.”

“In New Orleans there was an interesting variation on the night doctors called the “needle men”. Thought to be medical students from Charity Hospital (now the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans), the needle men would poke an unsuspecting individual in the arm, resulting in death.”

“I sure don’t go out much at this time of year. You takes a chance just walkin’ on the streets. Them Needle Mens is everywhere. They always comes ’round in the fall, and they’s ’round to about March. You see, them Needle Mens is medical students from the Charity Hospital tryin’ to git your body to work on. That’s ’cause stiffs is very scarce at this time of the year”.

“Johns Hopkins Hospital was believed to be a source of “needle men” and the “black bottle men.” They were thought to kidnap African Americans right off the street. A woman from the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks states that “You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl. I’m telling you, I lived here in the fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us.””

On a related note, Michiko Kakutani gives us a quick view into mainstream writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book:

““Between the World and Me”… offers an abbreviated portrait of the author’s life at home, focusing mainly on the fear he felt growing up. Fear of the police, who he tells his son “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” … The “need to be always on guard” was exhausting, “the slow siphoning of essence,” Mr. Coates writes. He “feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give police a reason.” … They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” (bold mine.)

How Much anti-Psych Research is Funded by Guys who Think all Mental Illness is Caused by Dead Aliens?

And how much is just idiots?

“How the US Mental Health System Makes Natives Sick and Suicidal,” by David Walker.

Important backstory: once upon a time, I made some offhand comments about mental health/psychiatric drugs that accidentally influenced someone else to go off their medication, which began a downward spiral that  ended with them in the hospital after attempting suicide. Several years later, you could still see the words “I suck” scarred into their skin.

There were obviously some other nasty things that had nothing to do with me before the attempt, but regardless, there’s an important lesson: don’t say stupid ass things about mental health shit you know nothing about.

Also, don’t take mental health advice from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

In my entirely inadequate defense, I was young and very dumb. David Walker is neither–and he is being published by irresponsible people who ought to know better.

To be clear: I am not a psychiatrist. I’m a dumb person on the internet with opinions. I am going to do my very damn best to counteract even dumber ideas, but for god’s sakes, if you have mental health issues, consult with someone with actual expertise in the field.

Also, you know few things bug me like watching science and logic be abused. So let’s get down to business:

This is one of those articles where SJW-logic plus sketchy research of the sort that I suspect originated with funding from guys trying to prove that all mental illnesses were caused by Galactic Overlord Xenu combine to make a not very satisfying article. I suppose it is petty to complain that the piece didn’t flow well, but still, it irked.

Basically, to sum: The Indian Health Service is evil because it uses standard psychiatry language and treatment–the exact same language and treatment as everyone else in the country is getting–instead of filling its manuals with a bunch of social-justice buzzwords like “colonization” and “historical trauma”. The article does not tell us how, exactly, inclusion of these buzzwords is supposed to actually change the practice of psychiatry–part of what made the piece frustrating on a technical level.

The author then makes a bunch of absolutist claims about standard depression treatment that range from the obviously false to matters of real debate in the field. Very few of his claims are based on what I’d call “settled science”–and if you’re going to make absolutist claims about medical related things, please, try to only say things that are actually settled.

The crux of Walker’s argument is a claim that anti-depressants actually kill people and decrease libido, so therefore the IHS is committing genocide by murdering Indians and preventing the births of new ones.

Ugh, when I put it like that, it sounds so obviously dumb.

Some actual quotes:

“In the last 40 years, certain English words and phrases have become more acceptable to indigenous scholars, thought leaders, and elders for describing shared Native experiences. They include genocide, cultural destruction, colonization, forced assimilation, loss of language, boarding school, termination, historical trauma and more general terms, such as racism, poverty, life expectancy, and educational barriers. There are many more.”

Historical trauma is horribly sad, of course, but as a cause for depression, I suspect it ranks pretty low. If historical trauma suffered by one’s ancestors results in continued difficulties several generations down the line, then the descendants of all traumatized groups ought to show similar effects. Most of Europe got pretty traumatized during WWII, but most of Europe seems to have recovered. Even the Jews, who practically invented modern psychiatry, use standard psychiatric models for talking about their depression without invoking the Holocaust. (Probably because depression rates are pretty low in Israel.)

But if you want to pursue this line of argument, you would need to show first that Indians are being diagnosed with depression (or other mental disorders) at a higher rate than the rest of the population, and then you would want to show that a large % of the excess are actually suffering some form of long-term effects of historical trauma. Third, you’d want to show that some alternative method of treatment is more effective than the current method.

To be fair, I am sure there are many ways that psychiatry sucks or could be improved. I just prefer good arguments on the subject.

“…the agency’s behavioral health manual mentions psychiatrist and psychiatric 23 times, therapy 18 times, pharmacotherapy, medication, drugs, and prescription 16 times, and the word treatment, a whopping 89 times. But it only uses the word violence once, and you won’t find a single mention of genocide, cultural destruction, colonization, historical trauma, etc.—nor even racism, poverty, life expectancy or educational barriers.”

It’s absolutely shocking that a government-issued psychiatry manual uses standard terms used in the psychiatry field like “medication” and “psychiatrist,” but doesn’t talk about particular left-wing political theories. It’s almost like the gov’t is trying to be responsible and follow accepted practice in the field or something. Of course, to SJWs, even medical care should be sacrificed before the altar of advancing the buzz-word agenda.

“This federal agency doesn’t acknowledge the reality of oppression within the lives of Native people.”

and… so? I know it sucks to deal with people who don’t acknowledge what you’re going through. My own approach to such people is to avoid them. If you don’t like what the IHS has to offer, then offer something better. Start your own organization offering support to people suffering from historical trauma. If your system is superior, you’ll not only benefit thousands (perhaps millions!) of people, and probably become highly respected and well-off in the process. Even if you, personally, don’t have the resources to start such a project, surely someone does.

If you can’t do that, you can at least avoid the IHS if you don’t like them. No one is forcing you to go to them.

BTW, in case you are wondering what the IHS is, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them:

“The Indian Health Service (IHS) is an operating division (OPDIV) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). IHS is responsible for providing medical and public health services to members of federally recognized Tribes and Alaska Natives. … its goal is to raise their health status to the highest possible level. … IHS currently provides health services to approximately 1.8 million of the 3.3 million American Indians and Alaska Natives who belong to more than 557 federally recognized tribes in 35 states. The agency’s annual budget is about $4.3 billion (as of December 2011).”

Sounds nefarious. So who runs this evil agency of health?

“The IHS employs approximately 2,700 nurses, 900 physicians, 400 engineers, 500 pharmacists, and 300 dentists, as well as other health professionals totaling more than 15,000 in all. The Indian Health Service is one of two federal agencies mandated to use Indian Preference in hiring. This law requires the agency to give preference hiring to qualified Indian applicants before considering non-Indian candidates for positions. … The Indian Health Service is headed by Dr. Yvette Roubideaux, M.D., M.P.H., a member of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota.”

So… the IHS, run by Indians, is trying to genocide other Indians by giving them mental health care?

And maybe I’m missing something, but don’t you think Dr. Roubideaux has some idea about the historical oppression of her own people?

Then we get into some anti-Pfizer/Zoloft business:

“For about a decade, IHS has set as one of its goals the detection of Native depression. [How evil of them!] This has been done by seeking to widen use of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), which asks patients to describe to what degree they feel discouraged, downhearted, tired, low appetite, unable to sleep, slow-moving, easily distracted or as though life is no longer worth living.

The PHQ-9 was developed in the 1990s for drug behemoth Pfizer Corporation by prominent psychiatrist and contract researcher Robert Spitzer and several others. Although it owns the copyright, Pfizer offers the PHQ-9 for free use by primary health care providers. Why so generous? Perhaps because Pfizer is a top manufacturer of psychiatric medications, including its flagship antidepressant Zoloft® which earned the company as much as $2.9 billion annually before it went generic in 2006.”

I agree that it is reasonable to be skeptical of companies trying to sell you things, but the mere fact that a company is selling a product does not automatically render it evil. For example, the umbrella company makes money if you buy umbrellas, but that doesn’t make the umbrella company evil. Pfizer wants to promote its product, but also wants to make sure it gets prescribed properly.

” Even with the discovery that the drug can increase the risk of birth defects, 41 million prescriptions for Zoloft® were filled in 2013.”

Probably to people who weren’t pregnant.

“The DSM III-R created 110 new psychiatric labels, a number that had climbed by another 100 more by the time I started working at an IHS clinic in 2000.

Around that time, Pfizer, like many other big pharmaceutical corporations, was pouring millions of dollars into lavish marketing seminars disguised as “continuing education” on the uses of psychiatric medication for physicians and nurses with no mental health training.

… After this event, several primary care colleagues began touting their new expertise in mental health, and I was regularly advised that psychiatric medications were (obviously) the new “treatment of choice.” ”

Seriously, he’s claiming that psychiatric medications were the “new” “treatment of choice” in the year 2000? Zoloft was introduced in 1991. Prozac revolutionized the treatment of depression way back in 1987. Walker’s off by over a decade.

Now, as Scott Alexander says, beware the man of one study: you can visit Prozac and Zoloft’s Wikipedia pages yourself and read the debate about effectiveness.

Long story short, as I understand it: psychiatric medication is actually way cheaper than psychological therapy. If your primary care doctor can prescribe you Zoloft, then you can skip paying to see a psychiatrist all together.

Back in the day, before we had much in the way of medication for anything, the preferred method for helping people cope with their problems was telling them that they secretly wanted to fuck their mothers. This sounds dumb, but it beats the shit out of locking up mentally ill people in asylums where they tended to die hideously. Unfortunately, talking to people about their problems doesn’t seem to have worked all that well, though you could bill a ton for half hour session every week for forty years straight or until the patient ran out of money.

Modern anti-depressant medications appear to actually work for people with moderate to severe depression, though last time I checked, medication combined with therapy/support had the best outcomes–if anything, I suspect a lot of people could use a lot more support in their lives.

I should clarify: when I say “work,” I don’t mean they cure the depression. This has not been my personal observation of the depressed people I know, though maybe they do for some people. What they do seem to do is lessen the severity of the depression, allowing the depressed person to function.

” Since those days, affixing the depression label to Native experience has become big business. IHS depends a great deal upon this activity—follow-up “medication management” encounters allow the agency to pull considerable extra revenue from Medicaid. One part of the federal government supplements funding for the other. That’s one reason it might be in the best interest of IHS to diagnose and treat depression, rather than acknowledge the emotional and behavioral difficulties resulting from chronic, intergenerational oppression.”

It’s totally awful of the US gov’t to give free medication and health care to people. Medically responsible follow up to make sure the patients are responding properly to their medication and not having awful side effects is especially evil. The government should totally cut that out. From now on, lets cancel health services for the Native Peoples. That will totally end oppression.

Also, anyone who has ever paid an ounce of attention to anything the government does knows that expanding the IHS’s mandate to acknowledge the results of oppression would increase their funding, not decrease it.

Forgive me if it sounds a bit like Walker is actually trying to increase his pay.

“The most recent U.S. Public Health Service practice guidelines, which IHS primary care providers are required to use, states that “depression is a medical illness,” and in a nod to Big Pharma suppliers like Pfizer, serotonin-correcting medications (SSRIs) like Zoloft® “are frequently recommended as first-line antidepressant treatment options.” ”

My god, they use completely standard terminology and make factual statements about their field! Just like, IDK, all other mental healthcare providers in the country and throughout most of the developed world.

“This means IHS considers Native patients with a positive PHQ-9 screen to be mentally ill with depression.”

Dude, this means the that patients of EVERY RACE with a positive PHQ-9 are mentally ill with depression. Seriously, it’s not like Pfizer issues a separate screening guide for different races. If I visit a shrink, I’m going to get the exact same questionaires as you are.

Also, yes, depression is considered a mental illness, but Walker knows as well as I do that there’s a big difference between mentally ill with depression and, say, mentally ill with untreated schizophrenia.

” instance, the biomedical theory IHS is still promoting is obsolete. After more than 50 years of research, there’s no valid Western science to back up this theory of depression (or any other psychiatric disorder besides dementia and intoxication). There’s no chemical imbalance to correct.”

Slate Star Codex did a very long and thorough takedown of this particular claim: simply put, Walker is full of shit and should be ashamed of himself. The “chemical imbalance” model of depression, while an oversimplification, is actually pretty darn accurate, mostly because your brain is full of chemicals. As Scott Alexander points out:

“And this starts to get into the next important point I want to bring up, which is chemical imbalance is a really broad idea.

Like, some of these articles seem to want to contrast the “discredited” chemical imbalance theory with up-and-coming “more sophisticated” theories based on hippocampal neurogenesis and neuroinflammation. Well, I have bad news for you. Hippocampal neurogenesis is heavily regulated by brain-derived neutrophic factor, a chemical. Neuroinflammation is mediated by cytokines. Which are also chemicals. Do you think depression is caused by stress? The stress hormone cortisol is…a chemical. Do you think it’s entirely genetic? Genes code for proteins – chemicals again. Do you think it’s caused by poor diet? What exactly do you think food is made of?”

One of the most important things about the “chemical imbalance model” is that it helps the patient (again quoting Scott):

” People come in with depression, and they think it means they’re lazy, or they don’t have enough willpower, or they’re bad people. Or else they don’t think it, but their families do: why can’t she just pull herself up with her own bootstraps, make a bit of an effort? Or: we were good parents, we did everything right, why is he still doing this? Doesn’t he love us?

And I could say: “Well, it’s complicated, but basically in people who are genetically predisposed, some sort of precipitating factor, which can be anything from a disruption in circadian rhythm to a stressful event that increases levels of cortisol to anything that activates the immune system into a pro-inflammatory mode, is going to trigger a bunch of different changes along metabolic pathways that shifts all of them into a different attractor state. This can involve the release of cytokines which cause neuroinflammation which shifts the balance between kynurinins and serotonin in the tryptophan pathway, or a decrease in secretion of brain-derived neutrotrophic factor which inhibits hippocampal neurogenesis, and for some reason all of this also seems to elevate serotonin in the raphe nuclei but decrease it in the hippocampus, and probably other monoamines like dopamine and norepinephrine are involved as well, and of course we can’t forget the hypothalamopituitaryadrenocortical axis, although for all I know this is all total bunk and the real culprit is some other system that has downstream effects on all of these or just…”

Or I could say: “Fuck you, it’s a chemical imbalance.””

I’m going to quote Scott a little more:

“I’ve previously said we use talk of disease and biology to distinguish between things we can expect to respond to rational choice and social incentives and things that don’t. If I’m lying in bed because I’m sleepy, then yelling at me to get up will solve the problem, so we call sleepiness a natural state. If I’m lying in bed because I’m paralyzed, then yelling at me to get up won’t change anything, so we call paralysis a disease state. Talk of biology tells people to shut off their normal intuitive ways of modeling the world. Intuitively, if my son is refusing to go to work, it means I didn’t raise him very well and he doesn’t love me enough to help support the family. If I say “depression is a chemical imbalance”, well, that means that the problem is some sort of complicated science thing and I should stop using my “mirror neurons” and my social skills module to figure out where I went wrong or where he went wrong. …

“What “chemical imbalance” does for depression is try to force it down to this lower level, tell people to stop trying to use rational and emotional explanations for why their friend or family member is acting this way. It’s not a claim that nothing caused the chemical imbalance – maybe a recent breakup did – but if you try to use your normal social intuitions to determine why your friend or family member is behaving the way they are after the breakup, you’re going to get screwy results. …

“So this is my answer to the accusation that psychiatry erred in promoting the idea of a “chemical imbalance”. The idea that depression is a drop-dead simple serotonin deficiency was never taken seriously by mainstream psychiatry. The idea that depression was a complicated pattern of derangement in several different brain chemicals that may well be interacting with or downstream from other causes has always been taken seriously, and continues to be pretty plausible. Whatever depression is, it’s very likely it will involve chemicals in some way, and it’s useful to emphasize that fact in order to convince people to take depression seriously as something that is beyond the intuitively-modeled “free will” of the people suffering it. “Chemical imbalance” is probably no longer the best phrase for that because of the baggage it’s taken on, but the best phrase will probably be one that captures a lot of the same idea.”

Back to the article.

Walker states, ” Even psychiatrist Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychiatric Times, admitted “the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend.” ”

Oh, look, Dr. Pies was kind enough to actually comment on the article. You can scroll to the bottom to read his evisceration of Walker’s points–” …First, while I have indeed called the “chemical imbalance” explanation of mood disorders an “urban legend”—it was never a real theory propounded by well-informed psychiatrists—this in no way means that antidepressants are ineffective, harmful, or no better than “sugar pills.” The precise mechanism of action of antidepressants is not relevant to how effective they are, when the patient is properly diagnosed and carefully monitored. …

” Even Kirsch’s data (which have been roundly criticized if not discredited) found that antidepressants were more effective than the placebo condition for severe major depression. In a re-analysis of the United States Food and Drug Administration database studies previously analyzed by Kirsch et al, Vöhringer and Ghaemi concluded that antidepressant benefit is seen not only in severe depression but also in moderate (though not mild) depression. …

” While there is no clear evidence that antidepressants significantly reduce suicide rates, neither is there convincing evidence that they increase suicide rates.”

Here’s my own suspicion: depressed people on anti-depressants have highs and lows, just like everyone else, but because their medication can’t completely 100% cure them, sooner or later they end up feeling pretty damn shitty during a low point and start thinking about suicide or actually try it.

However, Pies notes that there are plenty of studies that have found that anti-depressants reduce a person’s overall risk of suicide.

In other words, Walker is, at best, completely misrepresenting the science to make his particular side sound like the established wisdom in the field when he is, in fact, on the minority side. That doesn’t guarantee that he’s wrong–it just means he is a liar.

And you know what I think about liars.

And you can probably imagine what I think about liars who lie in ways that might endanger the mental health of other people and cause them to commit suicide.

But wait, he keeps going:

“In an astonishing twist, researchers working with the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that building more mental health services is a major factor in increasing the suicide rate. This finding may feel implausible, but it’s been repeated several times across large studies. WHO first studied suicide in relation to mental health systems in 100 countries in 2004, and then did so again in 2010, concluding that:

“[S]uicide rates… were increased in countries with mental health legislation, there was a significant positive correlation between suicide rates, and the percentage of the total health budget spent on mental health; and… suicide rates… were higher in countries with greater provision of mental health services, including the number of psychiatric beds, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, and the availability of training in mental health for primary care professionals.””

Do you know why I’ve been referring to Walker as “Walker” and not “Dr. Walker,” despite his apparent PhD? It’s because anyone who does not understand the difference between correlation and causation does not deserve a doctorate degree–or even a highschool degree–of any sort. Maybe people spend more on mental health because of suicides?

Oh, look, here’s the map he uses to support his claim:

Look at all those high-mental healthcare spending African countries!

I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like the former USSR, India/Bhutan/Nepal, Sub-Saharan Africa, Guyana, and Japan & the Koreas have the highest suicide rates in the world. Among these countries, all but Japan and S. Korea are either extremely poor and probably have little to no public spending on mental healthcare, or are former Soviet countries that are both less-developed than their lower-suicide brothers to the West and whatever is going on in them is probably related to them all being former Soviet countries, rather than their fabulous mental healthcare funding.

In other words, this map shows the opposite of what Walker claims it does.

Again, this doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong. It just means that the data on the subject is mixed and does not clearly support his case in the manner he claims.

” Despite what’s known about their significant limitations and scientific groundlessness, antidepressants are still valued by some people for creating “emotional numbness,” according to psychiatric researcher David Healy.”

So they don’t have any effects, but people keep using them for their… effects? Which is it? Do they work or not work?

And emotional numbness is a damn sight better than wanting to kill yourself. That Walker does not recognize this shows just how disconnected he is from the realities of life for many people struggling with depression.

“The side effect of antidepressants, however, in decreasing sexual energy (libido) is much stronger than this numbing effect—sexual disinterest or difficulty becoming aroused or achieving orgasm occurs in as many as 60 percent of consumers.”

Which, again, is still better than wanting to kill yourself. I hear death really puts a dent in your sex life.

However, I will note that this is a real side effect, and if you are taking anti-depressants and really can’t stand the mood kill (pardon the pun,) talk to your doctor, because there’s always the possibility that a different medication will treat your depression without affecting your libido.

“A formal report on IHS internal “Suicide Surveillance” data issued by Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Epidemiology Center states the suicide rate for all U.S. adults currently hovers at 10 for every 100,000 people, while for the Native patients IHS tracked, the rate was 17 per 100,000. This rate varied widely across the regions IHS serves—in California it was 5.5, while in Alaska, 38.5.”

Interesting statistics. I’m guessing the difference between Alaska and California holds true for whites, too–I suspect it’s the long, cold, dark winters.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention,

“In 2013, the highest U.S. suicide rate (14.2) was among Whites and the second highest rate (11.7) was among American Indians and Alaska Natives (Figure 5). Much lower and roughly similar rates were found among Asians and Pacific Islanders (5.8), Blacks (5.4) and Hispanics (5.7).”

Their graph:

So much for that claim

Hey, do you know which American ethnic group also has a history of trauma and oppression? Besides the Jews. Black people.

If trauma and oppression leads to depression and suicide, then the black suicide rate ought to be closer to the Indian suicide rate, and the white rate ought to be down at the bottom.

I guess this is a point in favor of my “whites are depressive” theory, though.

Also, “In 2013, nine U.S. states, all in the West, had age-adjusted suicide rates in excess of 18: Montana (23.7), Alaska (23.1), Utah (21.4), Wyoming (21.4), New Mexico (20.3), Idaho (19.2), Nevada (18.2), Colorado (18.5), and South Dakota (18.2). Five locales had age-adjusted suicide rates lower than 9 per 100,000: District of Columbia (5.8), New Jersey (8.0), New York (8.1), Massachusetts (8.2), and Connecticut (8.7).”

States by suicide rate

Hrm, looks like there’s also a guns and impulsivity/violence correlation–I think the West was generally settled by more violent, impulsive whites who like the rough and tumble lifestyle, and where there are guns, people kill themselves with them.

I bet CA has some restrictive gun laws and some extensive mental health services.

You know the dark blue doesn’t look like it correllates with?

Healthcare funding.

Back to Walker. “Nearly one in four of these suicidal medication overdoses used psychiatric medications. The majority of these medications originated through the Indian Health Service itself and included amphetamine and stimulants, tricyclic and other antidepressants, sedatives, benzodiazepines, and barbiturates.”

Shockingly, people diagnosed with depression sometimes try to commit suicide.

Wait, aren’t amphetamines and “stimulants” used primarily for treating conditions like ADHD or to help people stay awake, not depression? And aren’t sedatives, benzos, and barbiturates used primarily for things like anxiety and pain relief? I don’t think these were the drugs Walker is looking for.

” What’s truly remarkable is that this is not the first time the mental health movement in Indian Country has helped to destroy Native people. Today’s making of a Mentally Ill Indian to “treat” is just a variation on an old idea, … The Native mental health system has been a tool of cultural genocide for over 175 years—seven generations. Long before there was this Mentally Ill Indian to treat, this movement was busy creating and perpetuating the Crazy Indian, the Dumb Indian, and the Drunken Indian.”

Walker’s depiction of the past may be accurate. His depiction of the present sounds like total nonsense.

” We must make peace with the fabled Firewater Myth, a false tale of heightened susceptibility to alcoholism and substances that even Native people sometimes tell themselves.”

The fuck? Of course Indians are more susceptible to alcoholism than non-Indians–everyone on earth whose ancestors haven’t had a long exposure to wheat tends to handle alcohol badly. Hell, the Scottich are more susceptible to alcoholism than, say, the Greeks:

Some people just have trouble with alcohol. Like the Russians.

 

Look, I don’t know if the IHS does a good job. Maybe its employes are poorly-trained, abrasive pharmaceutical shills who diagnose everyone who comes through their doors with depression and then prescribes them massive quantities of barbiturates.

And it could well be that the American psychiatric establishment is doing all sorts of things wrong.

But the things Walker cites in the article don’t indicate anything of the sort.

And for goodness sakes, if you’re depressed or have any other mental health problem, get advice from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.